Part 8: How do I Get Artist Consistency in my music collection

Before we started digitizing music each album was a separate physical item.We found the one we wanted either because we had ordered our CDs or Vinyl ordered by the main artist or we just looked at a random set of albums until we saw one we fancied listening to.

But with digital music got much larger, and computers are not as good as humans at realizing that slight differences in artist names actually refer to the same artist.

Common problems are:

Artists are not always attributed the same on every release:

Minor differences in names, such as initials, spelling errors

Artist deliberately use different name e.g Prince, , Formerly Known As

Tools that lookup CD such as dbPoweramp do independently of any other CD by same artist, so no consistency and with manual edit, easy to make mistakes and introduce inconsistencies

But SongKong understands Artists as entities ( we store an Artist Id we know who they are). We use MusicBrainz Artist Entities, defacto standard used by BBC, last.fm, Google and Spotify. But our database cross references MusicBrainz and Discogs, so we can use MusicBrainz artists even when we have only matched to a Discogs release.

Each MusicBrainz Artist has a Canonical Name, instead of using name on release we can use their main name for all their releases.If their main name is not in Roman script (eg Пётр Ильич Чайковский) we can use their Roman/English version of name instead.

Friday, 2 November 2018

The new release is named after an album by King of the Slums. Vicious violin playing against downbeat lyrical stories make it truly like
nothing else, one of Manchesters unsung heroes. You can give it a listen here on Spotify

Use Windows compatible characters in filenames

This happens anyway when running SongKong on Windows but with the increase in customers using SongKong with linux based NAS servers a potential problem became apparent. Linux allows ':' in the filename but Windows does not, so if you create such a filename on linux but then remotely view the files in Windows Explorer a pseudo filename is generated instead that bears no relation to the actual filename. The colon character is commonly used in the album title of classical albums to separate the composer from the performers so it is a particular issue with classical music.

So we have added a new option that ensures any filenames created will be visible in Windows, any characters that are not allowed will be replaced with an hyphen character.

This option is not available on Windows installs since any names created on Windows will be Windows compatible anyway.

Melco Installations

Previous versions were missing a way to halt SongKong, and a way to prevent SongKong automatically starting when your Melco started. Solutions provided for both of these now, please see the Melco Install Page for details.

Get back to Progress page if Browser reopened

A few customers have encountered this issue when running in Remote Mode. Now this has been resolved as follows, if you reopen the browser and try to start another task it will now display an error message and take you to the progress page of the currently running task.

Better Memory Usage

The most memory hungry part of SongKong is actually the report generation at the end of the task. So if you are fixing alot of songs on a low memory device there could be an issue with the report creation, this has now been rewritten so that it does not require significant memory.

There was also an issue in Remote Mode that if there was a memory issue SongKong would just shutdown immediately instead of handling the memory issue, cancelling the task and creation a report . This has now been resolved.

Wednesday, 17 October 2018

We just received a support request from a customer who had just moved from using SongKong on a PC to using Synology Disk Station.

Hi Paul I have a technical issue with songkong the server version
for Synology. it works but not all the time. Ive attached a screenshot
which appears to leave the files in an incomplete state. when I undo and
then go to the desktop version of dry it completes properly. it has
this error maybe 50/50.

Actually what is happening here is the files are actually fine, but they are not Windows compatible because of one of the characters used.

Problem

Lets look at a folder on my own computer, it exhibits the same problem.

But if we view the same files using File Station on the Synology itself then everything looks fine

The problem is simply that the filenames include the colon character ':' and this is invalid in Windows so Windows just displays an alternative almost random filename. If you try and add such a character on Windows itself you get the following message

The problem is worse for Classical Albums, since convention dictates the album title separates main performers and composer from the title with a colon. So if this is used as part of the filename mask then the colon finds its way into the filename itself.

The same problem also exists for QNAP servers and any linux server.

Short Term Solution

Firstly the files are just fine, you will only see this issue if remotely viewing them from a Windows PC, viewing from a Mac or Linux computer wil be fine since these are both UNIX based.

But if you are a Windows machine it would be nicer if the files displayed correctly on your PC. So short term the solution are:

Set Rename files based on metadata to No on the Basic tab, this is the default setting and will prevent file renaming.

Edit the filename using Edit Songs Metadata to remove the colon, then they will display again as expected on your PC.

Long term Solution

In the next release we will add a new option to SongKong to enforce Windows compatible filenames when running on non-Windows systems. If SongKong is running on Windows then it only creates windows compatible filenames anyway.

Supported Versions

SongKong is available for all QNAP models that support QTS App Center (v4.2 or above) and the Container Station package, this is currently all recent QNAP models with an Intel CPU and also any QNAP
with an Arm CPU as long as they have at least 1GB of memory.

Arm - TS-x28, TS-x31P, TS-x31X, TS-x31+ series and TS-1635 with a minimum of 1GB RAM

Full Version, Full Functionality

This is the complete full version of SongKong, with exact same functionality as the PC, Mac and linux versions. The only difference is that you always control SongKong via the web interface rather than choosing between web and desktop interface.

Advantages of using SongKong on a NAS

There are three major advantages of using SongKong on the same NAS as your music resides instead of on your PC or Mac.

Permanently available

Your NAS is usually on permanently, this means SongKong is instantly available if you want to fix or improve an issue with your metadata. And because it only uses the Remote interface it is available from any device that can connect to your NAS, this could be your iPad or Phone as well as a computer.

In contrast your computer is not probably permanently on, and even if it is it may get rebooted if you have it configured to get auto updates. Unless you are using SongKong in Remote mode it will not be accessible away from the computer and therefore you'll not be able to quickly dive in with your iPad.

Performance

SongKong performance is based on three factors, cpu, memory and I/O. NAS has a big advantage with I/O since SongKong can access the files locally when reading the file and when writing changes to the file. Whereas a PC has to transfer the contents of your file over the network, and then send it back again when modifications are made. This has most significant effect when using large lossless files such as Wav, Aif and Dsf formats.

Your PC may still have the upper hand with cpu and memory, however the more recent NAS servers have much better specifications than earlier machines. And NAS servers are probably not doing that much most of time. So it can be a more efficient use of resources then using a PC and having SongKong competing for resource with other applications that you are using at the same time.

Reliability

Because the file I/O is local there is no risk of SongKong losing a connection to a file, so it is fundamentally more reliable than modifying files over a wi-fi network.

Thursday, 11 October 2018

SongKong Tutorial Part 7: How to add metadata to your music

Where does the Album and Artist information, displayed in your
music player, come from? In most cases this information is stored within
the music files themselves as metadata. This is separate to the filename that may possibly contain some metadata such as Title or Track No but is not a practical way to store more then the bare minimum of information.

Different audio formats have different metadata formats, commonly known as tags. For example Flac and Ogg Vorbis files both use Vorbis Comments to store metadata whereas Mp3, Aif, Wav and Dsfall use ID3. But players and other tools such as SongKong usually try to hide these differences.

Metadata is added by SongKong once the song (and album) have been identified. The Match tab helps determine how songs are identified whereas the Format tab decides what metadata is added.

This is an important distinction, for example you may want SongKong to identify all your songs, but add no metadata to your songs apart from MusicBrainz Ids, this would be done by altering the configuration on the Format tab.Additionally the Artwork tab defines how artwork is added, the Genre tab defines how Genres are added and the Classical tab defines additional special options for Classical music.But we will begin with the Format tab

Part 6: SongKong Tutorial: What databases can be used for automatic song identification ?

In the previous section we described ways you could modify how songs and albums were identified. But of course the key things that decides what songs are identified are the databases that SongKong uses, so lets explain these.

SongKong uses MusicBrainz, Discogs and AcoustId for song identification, and by default it uses all of these.

If you have a Melco license it can also use existing Naim Wav metadata files but this is a special case. It only applies to customers with a Melco license who files identified using a Naim server such as a Unitiserve and ripped their music to Wav format, so we will discuss this later on.

MusicBrainz

This is the Gold Standard, metadata is rarely wrong and frequently very detailed. Once songs have been matched to a MusicBrainz album it also makes it very easy to lookup additional databases by the MusicBrainz identifiers, since this has become the defacto standard.So for example we can look up artwork from the Cover Art Archive and acoustic analysis from AcousticBrainzWe can also frequently lookup Artist and Albums pages from Wikipedia and Discogs.....

Discogs

Discogs is a database that concentrates on physical releases (such as CD's/Vinyl) since it allows people to buy and sales records.When we have matched to a MusicBrainz album then we often have a direct link to an equivalent Discogs release, and this is very useful because Discogs often has additional information that MusicBrainz does not have. And this includes Cover Art so now we have another source for that all important front cover art.

But we can also search Discogs when we do not have a MusicBrainz match. Although there is much overlap, MusicBrainz has albums that are not in Discogs, and Discogs has albums that are not in MusicBrainz. In fact the Discogs database is larger than MusicBrainz so it is very important to have this second database.

AcoustId

AcoustId creates an audio fingerprint of your songs, this then allows the song to be looked up in the AcoustId database, and the AcoustId database often has a link from an AcoustId to a MusicBrainz Recording Id - so in that way we match songs to MusicBrainz.So the primary use of AcoustId is to help to match your songs to MusicBrainz, AcoustIds are used in conjunction with existing metadata and folder structure to find the correct match.But AcoustId database is larger than both MusicBrainz and Discogs. So it can very usefully be used to add basic metadata for songs that could not be found in MusicBrainz or Discogs.

Enabling or Disabling these Databases

You can enable/disable matching from MusicBrainz/Discogs and using the link from MusicBrainz to Discogs releases, options are highlighted below on the Match tab. You need to select Show Advanced to see the Disocgs options.

AcoustIds are always calculated as required but you can force SongKong to calculate for every song even when not neccessary for song identification by enabling Force Acoustic fingerprints even if already matched.

Wednesday, 10 October 2018

SongKong Tutorial: Part 5 - Fix Songs, Review Match Options

So you have run Fix Songs in Preview mode, but maybe it is not quite how you want it. This is the time to take a look at the options and fine tune, lets discuss some of the key options you may want to modify that affect song identification.

All these options are on the Match tab

Match: All Existing folders represent a single album

SongKong generally treats folders as an album, this means it will only allow a match to an album if all songs in the folder match to the same album. But it also tries to recognise the occasional folder full of essentially random songs and treat them differently, allowing songs in such a folder to be matched to different albums or not matched at all;.

But if you know that every folder really does represent an album (or disc of a multi-disc album) then you can enable this option to force SongKong to treat all folders in this way.

Match: Preferred Release Countries

Often Albums often have different versions for different territories and countries, but there may be no physical difference between the track listing to help SongKong decide the release to choose.

For example the Italian and German version of a particular release may have different catalogue
numbers or be released by a different record label. But this is
information is very unlikely to be in your existing metadata so SongKong
cannot use that to decide the release to pick.

But you can select a list of preferred countries that your albums are from and selecting those countries will give releases from those countries a boost making it more likely that they will be selected.